Piret Voolaid

Piret Voolaid is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Folkloristics of the Estonian Literary Museum, and an Executive Manager of the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies. She defended her PhD (“Estonian Riddles as a Folklore Genre in a Changing Cultural Context”) in the field of Estonian and comparative folklore at the University of Tartu in 2011. Her current interests include minor forms of folklore (subgenres of Estonian riddles, proverbs in their various contemporary contexts), children’s and youth, Internet, and sports lore. She has compiled academic comprehensive databases of the subgenres of riddles (droodles, joking questions, compound puns, abbreviation riddles, etc.), and a database of graffiti. She has written several studies on the topic and compiled popular editions on the basis of the database materials. She has been a guest editor of special issues for Folklore: EJF and Mäetagused and has been editor of few monographs. She is a review editor of the journals Folklore: EJF and Mäetagused. She has experience in working with international collaborative projects of collecting school lore and participated in different interdisciplinary and research projects in Estonia and abroad. Currently she is partaking in an institutional project “Narrative and belief aspects of folklore studies”.
Address: Tartu, Estonia